


Animal Instincts

by ArgentumCivitas



Category: Reno: 911!
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Homophobic Language, Insects, One Shot, Slice of Life, Smoking, a bad day for Garcia, a normal day in Reno in that there are shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29691090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentumCivitas/pseuds/ArgentumCivitas
Summary: The manager of the Desert Sands Motel calls the Sheriff’s Department about a suspicious vehicle, and the deputies head out there to deal with a...sticky situation.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 6
Collections: /r/FanFiction Prompt Challenge #22 / February 2021





	Animal Instincts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the February 2021 Prompt Challenge on /r/FanFiction, as Saint Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers.
> 
> As with everything Reno 911!, canon is a loose set of guidelines, rather than a strict mandate. I prefer to think about how the deputies would react when confronted with the sort of situation that they might face, rather than hew to a strict portrayal of the (possible) facts.
> 
> I imagine this taking place sometime smack in the middle of Season 4 and note that it is probably as close to canon-compliant as things are likely to get in Reno.

425B, the code for a suspicious vehicle, was the sort of call that came into the Sheriff’s Department a lot. These usually ended up being something innocuous, like an abandoned car on the side of the freeway or a pissed-off suburban woman who’d discovered a bum parked in front of her house. However, this call was from the Desert Sands motel on the edge of town, which was already a little out of the ordinary. It would have to be something truly suspicious to raise eyebrows all the way out there, so once Dangle was done with the morning briefing, he sent Jones and Garcia in one car, and Clemmy and Raineesha in another, to go check out what was going on. “But be careful, because I guess dispatch said it’s also a 430,” he said to all of them before they left. “Call in some backup if you think you need it.”

“What does he think is goin’ on out there?” Garcia scoffed as Jones pulled the cruiser out of the parking lot. “Do you remember what a 430 is?” It was not a code that came up often, and Garcia hadn’t wanted to admit to Dangle that he couldn’t remember what it was.

“Isn’t that the code for a gas leak?” Jones asked. “Or maybe it’s Brother Thor and those creepy Jehovah’s Witnesses again? We haven’t seen them around in a while,” he said, with a shudder of remembrance, since Brother Thor stood about six-foot-eight, loved nothing more than to share the good news about Jehovah, and had a brutally extensive repertoire of wrestling holds in his divine arsenal.

“I wonder if the girls know,” Garcia said, picking up the radio and hitting the call button. “Clemmy, Williams, you there?”

“We’re here,” Clemmy’s voice came back over the radio. “Do you guys know what a 430 is? We can’t figure it out.” Usually at least one person knew what was going on, but apparently that wasn’t the case today.

They debated the entire way about the things that a 430 might be—streaker on PCP, masturbating crackhead, mime performing without a permit. Raineesha nearly had them all convinced that it was a brand-new code for Frisbee and his half-feral pack of hellions until they arrived. The motel’s parking lot was almost empty, except for an old, white, beat-up flatbed truck with Idaho plates that was parked in the far corner. It had an eight-foot tall hydraulic boom loader on the flatbed right behind the cab, but that paled in comparison to its cargo.

The truck was loaded absolutely full of square, white-painted beehives.

“Holy shit!” Garcia said as Jones parked the cruiser and turned it off. Clemmy pulled her car in right next to them, as far away from the truck as she could get while still technically inside the parking lot. With the engines off, even inside the cars, they all heard the low humming sound of the bees and could see the bees flying around the parking lot, darting in and out of the hives, hundreds or maybe even thousands of them.

The radio crackled again. “Am I seeing this right?” Clemmy said, through the radio. “Are those—”

“Bees,” said Jones. He looked terrified, his hands gripping the steering wheel tighter and tighter.

The motel’s manager, who had seen them arrive and was making his way gingerly over to the cars, dodging bees here and there, knocked on Garcia’s window. “Hey, thanks for coming out here so fast,” he said. “You see the problem.”

“Uh, yeah,” Garcia said, through the window, making no motion to roll it down. “What do you need us for, exactly?”

“Get him to leave!” the manager said, as a bee landed on his rumpled blue polo shirt and he swatted at it. “I can’t have a truckload of beehives here in the parking lot!”

“All right, sir, we’ll see what we can do,” Garcia said, as he took a deep breath and slipped out of the car as fast as he could, trying his best not to let any bees inside. Jones still had his hands on the steering wheel and hadn’t moved. “Go on ahead and get back to the office,” Garcia said to the manager, who looked relieved to have someone’s permission to go.

At this point, both Clemmy and Raineesha had already gotten out of their car and seemed strangely calm about the entire situation. “This has got to be some white nonsense,” Raineesha said, as a couple of bees flew close to her hat and she waved them away. “I ain’t never seen a black beekeeper before.”

“Because it’s honest work?” Garcia said, in what he thought was an under-his-breath tone that only Clemmy would be able to hear, but she was too far behind him, rummaging through the trunk of the car for something. Raineesha picked up on it instead, though, and narrowed her eyes at him.

“Listen, you little Mexican—” she started, sharply, but she was cut off by the slam of the trunk lid. Clemmy had found what she was looking for: a beekeeper’s helmet with an attached veil.

“I never thought I’d need this for real,” Clemmy said as she handed the helmet to Garcia. Raineesha just gave him a dirty look and took her hand off the canister of Mace at her belt.

“You expect me to wear this?” Garcia said. With the number of bees flying around, it seemed like it might actually be helpful. But at the same time, he didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of Raineesha and especially not in front of Clemmy.

“I’m not messing up my hair,” Clemmy said, “and I’m not getting any closer to that truck than I am right now.” They all turned to look at the truck, though it hadn’t moved from where it had been when they arrived.

Jones hadn’t moved from inside the car, either. “Jonesy?” Raineesha said, tapping on the window. “Are you all right?” He turned his head to look at her, and all they could hear—aside from the buzzing sound from the beehives, which was louder outside the cars—was the sound of Jones’s muffled screaming. “Just let me talk to him,” she said, as she quickly opened the door.

However, once she’d slipped safely inside the car, Raineesha slammed the door shut and yelled, “Let’s go, Jonesy!” At that, Jones started the car, threw it in reverse, and nearly ran over Garcia and Clemmy in his haste to get away from the motel as quickly as possible.

Garcia shook his head as he watched them leave. To be honest, ever since Jones hadn’t gotten out of the car, he’d kind of been expecting something like this to happen. “Looks like it’s just you and me now, Clemmy,” he said.

“No way, I’m calling for backup,” she said. “You want to go talk to him in the meantime, be my guest.”

“Don’t call just yet,” Garcia said. He had an idea. “Tell you what. I get him to leave, the two of us go out on a real date.” He’d been hounding Clemmy to go out with him for weeks and she’d shot him down each time. But he just knew, deep down inside, that one perfect evening of romance would be all that it would take to get them to hit it off like they never had before…and to make Clemmy forget about Jones once and for all. Especially after Jones’s most recent display of cowardice.

“And if you don’t?” she said. That possibility didn’t even enter Garcia’s mind.

“I’ll leave you alone, won’t ever ask you again,” he said. He was bluffing and they both knew it, but Clemmy laughed anyway.

“You’ve got a deal,” she said, with a toss of her hair. “But make it someplace nice, like Dan Swanky’s.”

“Well, all right then,” Garcia said, with renewed confidence. The prospect of a genuine date with Clemmy made him feel like he could do anything—even get up close to a truck full of beehives. He looked over at the truck again, shading his eyes against the surprisingly bright February sun. It was hard to tell from across the parking lot, but there couldn’t be more than fifty hives on the truck. Definitely not as many as a hundred, right? And how many bees could there possibly be in a beehive, anyway?

When he put on the helmet and veil, Clemmy snickered a little, but she said, “You look great,” and fairly pushed him on his way. It did make him feel a little better as he headed toward the truck and the sound of the bees got louder and louder. He knocked on the truck door with authority and said, “Sheriff’s Department,” in the sternest tone that he could muster, trying not to smack the occasional curious bee that landed on him, here and there, to investigate what was going on.

Garcia was surprised, then, not to hear a voice from inside the truck, but for the door of the closest motel room to open, and to see a woman emerge and close the door behind her. She was wearing a grubby canvas jumpsuit that had probably once been white, with its arms tied at her waist, and a light green tank top that revealed her muscular arms. Her hair was scraped back in a no-nonsense ponytail and she had a dark blue bandanna tied around her head. She looked like the kind of person he’d known back in the Marines—someone who was used to getting things done without any fuss.

“Can I help you, officer?” the woman said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

“Uh, possibly, ma’am,” Garcia said. “Are you the owner of this truck?”

“I am,” she said, short and to the point and with no attempt to lie, which he appreciated on one level.

“Well, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to move it,” he said. She considered the request for a moment—and then laughed. It was certainly not the reaction that Garcia was expecting.

“You’re kidding, right?” she said, “and your veil’s on backwards,” she added, a little derisively.

“Ma’am, I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Garcia said, but he grabbed the edges of the helmet and spun it around anyway. It was a little easier to see without the thick vertical seam in his field of vision, but he was no closer to solving the problem of the truck, and no closer to that promised date with Clemmy. “Look, ma’am—” Garcia started to say, but she cut him off.

“Melissa Putnam, Twin Falls Apiaries,” she said. “And if you knew anything about bees, you’d know I can’t move this truck until after dark.”

“Why exactly is that, ma’am?” he asked, bracing himself for what would undoubtedly be a long-winded, unnecessary, and deeply stupid explanation. Melissa was right, though. He didn’t know anything about bees, but he did know that whatever she told him wouldn’t matter. He might have been prepared to humor her for a bit, but nothing was going to stop him from making her leave the motel by the end of this conversation and win his bet with Clemmy.

“They’ll all head back into the hives for the night,” she said. “If I leave right now, you’re going to have thousands of disoriented bees flying around this parking lot, probably for days.”

Thousands of disoriented bees flying around for days sounded pretty bad, but Garcia was sure it wouldn’t be as dire as Melissa said. The bees would probably all just fly away somewhere else or freeze to death once it got cold again overnight. It was February, after all.

As he tried to think of a rebuttal, one of the bees that had been crawling around on his arm decided it was time to strike. “ **Son of a bitch**!” he said, as he felt the hot sharp pain on his left forearm and shook the bee off, by reflex.

“Pull the stinger out,” Melissa said, laconically, and he did, with some difficulty. She continued, “Once they get you once, they’ll probably get you again. Let’s get you farther away from the truck.”

As they made their way over to the cruiser, where Clemmy was trying to stay out of the path of the bees as much as possible, Garcia started to feel both lightheaded and dizzy. Though he’d already been anxious about getting close to the truck full of bees, it seemed like the anxiety was starting to build with every step, until he could almost hear his heartbeat roaring in his ears, felt his vision going hot and blurred. He looked down at his arm to see that it was rapidly swelling, and when he tried to speak, to ut words to what was happening, all that came out of his mouth was a high-pitched wheeze.

“ _ **Garcia!**_ ” Clemmy yelled as she saw him start to drop to the ground. Luckily, Melissa was right behind him, and caught him before he collapsed completely.

“Is he allergic?” Melissa called over to Clemmy, not looking at her as she lowered Garcia to the parking-lot pavement as swiftly, but gently, as she could. She tore off the helmet and veil and Clemmy could see Garcia’s face turning bright red, his hands clutching at his throat.

“I have _**no idea!**_ ” Clemmy called back, in a panic. “ _ **What do I do?!**_ ”

“Just call the paramedics,” Melissa said loudly, still without looking at Clemmy, as she pulled an Epi-Pen out of her pocket. She flipped the tube open with one thumb, dumped the auto-injector out into her other hand, pulled out the safety release with her teeth, and jabbed it straight into Garcia’s thigh with a hiss.

Once the paramedics arrived, they praised Melissa’s quick reaction and forethought for having an Epi-Pen handy in the first place, but she brushed off their accolades. “This kind of thing happens more often than you’d think,” she told Clemmy as the paramedics loaded Garcia into the ambulance.

“You saved his life,” Clemmy said, in a daze, all thoughts of bets and dates and Dan Swanky’s forgotten in the aftermath.

“You did, too, in a way,” Melissa said, as another cruiser pulled up to the parking lot. Clemmy didn’t say anything in reply, just gave her a grateful hug and waved at the arriving squad car as she got into her own car and followed the ambulance out of the parking lot.

The only members of the Sheriff’s Department left who were willing (and able) to come out to the motel were Dangle and Junior, as Kimball was already out speed-trapping and Wiegel had played the pregnancy trump card that she’d been using ever since she got back from that six months of “personal leave.” While Dangle was chagrined to find the problem had not yet been solved, Junior had the first genuinely useful piece of advice for any of the deputies all day, as he lit up a cigarette before leaving the car and offered one to Dangle, too. “The smoke’ll confuse ‘em, they’ll leave you alone,” Junior said.

“How do you know this stuff?” Dangle asked as he lit up.

“Uncle Jimmy-Joe Blackbeard, the pirate,” Junior said. “He’s got bees.” He looked over at the truck. “Ain’t like this, though.”

The smoke seemed to work at keeping the bees away from them, though neither Dangle nor Junior got close enough to the truck to test it out properly. Melissa met them as they got out of the car and directed them to the sidewalk outside the motel office, which was a little more sheltered from the bees’ main flight path. She introduced herself and apologized, as the motel manager peeked his head out of the door. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t go anywhere until the evening. It’ll be worse if I leave now.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” the manager said, almost apoplectic. “This is insane.” He looked to Dangle to plead his case.

“I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here,” Melissa said, as Junior exhaled a plume of smoke right into the flight path of an oncoming bee, which almost immediately redirected itself to avoid him. She looked over at him and continued, “I’m headed down to California for the almonds. I got the hives loaded and was already on the road when my farmer called. He said the weather changed and that they wouldn’t be ready for me for another four days or so, but I was too far along to turn around.”

“And that’s how you ended up stopping here in Reno?” Dangle asked, with his own bee-redirecting smoke exhalation.

“It seemed like the best place,” she said. “I tried to find something on the outskirts of town, so it wouldn’t be too disruptive. And I paid for four nights in advance, in cash,” she said, straight to the manager, who had joined them outside.

“I’m going to fire that night-shift guy when he comes in,” the manager said, as he pinched the bridge of his nose, underneath his glasses.

“Come on, Dave, don’t jump to any conclusions,” Dangle said to the manager. “It’s a fucking Tuesday. Who’s going to want a room from you this afternoon?” He looked over at Melissa. “You’ll leave tonight?”

“It doesn’t look like I have a choice,” she said. “Though if you’re making me leave, I’d appreciate a refund for the other nights that I paid for,” she said, with a withering look at Dave.

“I’m not refunding you anything,” Dave said to Melissa. “I’m going to have to shut down for the rest of the day and you nearly killed a cop in the parking lot.”

“I saved his life!” Melissa said. “That’s why I have the Epi-Pens, for things like that.”

“So that’s why the paramedics were here,” Dangle said, mostly to himself. He didn’t ask who it was—he already had a pretty good idea, after Jones and Williams had shown up back at the station earlier and he’d seen Clemmy wave to him before. He pitched the remainder of his cigarette, pulled out his notebook, and wrote down, _Note to self, Garcia’s deathly allergic to bees_, underlining the word “deathly” twice. Most of the time, it was kind of fun to be the boss, but it also meant that Dangle had to remember a lot more things than everyone else. This would be just one more item on the list of things for him to keep track of.

“Isn’t there anything you can do, officer?” Dave said. “I’m the one who called you in the first place.”

“I already said I’d leave tonight,” Melissa said. “It’s noon now and sunset’s at five-thirty. You can’t wait five and a half hours?” She looked at Dangle, as mediator. “I told the allergic guy, if I leave now, you’re going to have thousands of disoriented bees flying around, probably for days.”

“Dave, how many of your rooms are occupied right now?” Dangle asked him.

“I don’t know, I’d have to check,” Dave said. The motel’s parking lot was fairly deserted, though, with just a few cars scattered around.

“How about we go warn everyone who’s here about what’s going on and tell them to stay put until Melissa can leave?” Dangle said.

“Oh, they can leave if they want,” Melissa said. “The bees won’t bother anyone who leaves them alone.” She stuck her hands in her pockets and dropped her shoulders in an at-ease posture. “Of course, now I need someplace to go from here.”

“The proving ground,” Junior said, and everyone looked at him, as he’d been silently smoking through the entire conversation. Dangle nodded, because he knew exactly where Junior meant—it was the little patch of scrub desert far out of town where they went to shoot off contraband fireworks, and where they destroyed the station’s old microwave, and where they’d test out new combinations of explosives. It was the perfect place to park a truck full of bees for a couple of days.

“C’mon, I’ll draw you a map,” Junior said to Melissa, and they headed for the cruiser as both Dangle and Dave went into the motel’s office.

“That’s smart,” Melissa said, as Junior grabbed his notebook from the car.

“What’s that?” Junior said, as he flipped to a blank page and started sketching.

“The smoke,” she said. “They should have sent you out here in the first place.”

Junior wasn’t used to women calling him smart—or anyone calling him smart, for that matter—and he took it as not just a friendly overture, but a flirtatious one. He took another look at her, focusing on how the tight-fitting tank top hugged the curve of her breasts, but he also knew that the sunglasses he habitually wore would let him check her out without tipping her off that that’s what he was doing.

"It's a little tricky, gettin' out there," he said, as he finished the map, tore the page out of his notebook, and handed it to her. "I can come back and show you the way, if you want." By now, he’d decided that she wasn’t completely hideous, and besides, beggars couldn’t always be choosers.

"That'd be nice," Melissa said. "Thank you…what'd you say your name was?"

"Travis Junior," he said. "Maybe we could do somethin’ afterwards, too." He’d show her the way out there and propose the traditional Reno proving-grounds date—some delicious piping-hot Arby’s, a cheap six-pack, and a campfire. Maybe if everything went well, he’d finally be the one with a conquest to brag about in the locker room tomorrow morning, instead of having to listen to Jones go on and on about how great Clemmy was in the sack.

She smiled, politely. "You know what I'd really like?" she asked.

"What's that?" he said, still focused on her chest.

"Can you give me your friend's number?" she said.

"Dangle? You're barkin' up the wrong tree, he's a fag," he said. If the short-shorts weren’t a dead giveaway, anyone who actually listened to Dangle talk for more than two minutes would figure it out pretty goddamn quick. He flicked his gaze back up to her face…though she wouldn’t have seen him do it, because of the sunglasses.

"No, the allergic one," she said.

"You mean Garcia?" Junior asked, completely deflated. It was bad enough when he thought she wanted Dangle’s number, but now he was getting passed up for Garcia, of all people? Son of a bitch. "He ain't my friend. Savin' his life wasn't enough, what do you want his number for?" he said, incredulous, as all of his plans for the evening evaporated like smoke in the wind. Why did this kind of thing always seem to happen to him?

"Those Epi-Pens aren't free," Melissa said. "He owes me two hundred dollars."

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not a commercial beekeeper, but I do have some beehives of my own, and so I know from personal experience that if you don’t bother them, honeybees will generally leave you alone. But I do keep epinephrine auto-injectors on hand, just in case…
> 
> Many commercial beekeepers in the US earn a majority of their income from the annual California almond pollination, which usually begins on or around Valentine’s Day each year. Melissa’s beekeeping concern is a pretty small one; some commercial beekeepers have thousands of hives.
> 
> If you want to help the bees, plant native flowers, refrain from using pesticides in your garden or on your lawn, buy local honey, and support native pollinator habitats in your area.


End file.
